


Shades of Guilt

by ivyspinners



Category: Circle of Magic - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-10
Updated: 2010-07-10
Packaged: 2017-11-16 00:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/533527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyspinners/pseuds/ivyspinners
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The night Pirate's Point's lighthouse explodes, Aymery is having a guilt crisis at Winding Circle's library...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shades of Guilt

**Author's Note:**

> This story won First Place in the Winter 2010/2011 [Circle of Ficship](http://www.fanfiction.net/forum/The_Ficship_Competitions/54838/) Competitions. Woohoo!

The night he thinks of his family for the first time, he's on a pirate ship, one week away from the peaceful temple-city he's going to help raze to the ground.

He'd been caught between terror and business until then, while new, dirtier memories replaced old. The soothing rocking of the sea, like a mother cradling her child, had been his very first impression of the expansive ocean; he thinks now only of jeering pirates and cold sneers. He is annoyed that such precious recollections of treasured experiences are being marred by this... atrocity. Or rather, he might be annoyed, if he weren't too busy being afraid of his master, and just how painfully he'll die if he fails Enahar, the Lightsbridge mage, the pirate-queen's brother, the magic-thief.

Enahar unnerves him, because it would be so easy to slip up and give this man an excuse to call his debts. Enahar is all quicksilver and darkness, offering honey with one hand and poisoning it with the other, until Aymery thinks that maybe Enahar has some illusion magic too, like Aymery does, and that's why the pirate fleet off Summersea Harbor is hidden by a multi-layered illusion, fold after fold of an invisibility cloak.

The gold ring clamped around earlobe throbs in ungentle reminder of Enahar's power over him. This mirror-faced mage has forced Aymery into this slaughter, with the casual disregard of someone who is above such insignificant matters as a human life. Aymery is a helpless black pawn in an intricate game of raid-and-kill, black and white squares juxtaposed over the playing field of Winding Circle, bound by orders he'll follow to the spirit and an earring that will steal his life away if he does not. Aymery is in no position to argue.

(He forces down the potent mixture of new pain and old guilt at the very thought; his stomach roils like a stormy sea. He's struck by the irony of this thought, for Enahar is a force of nature: an earthquake, a storm, a forest fire against which any mortal becomes powerless, magic fading into leaves shredded in the wind while they scrabble for sanity.)

Aymery is so used to being helpless now that he's grown almost comfortable with his magic being leeched, until this man is bloated with power, like a tick after feeding. That's what he tells himself, at least, in the better moments when his power isn't being stripped away, as though that will ease the shame. To think, Aymery, scion of the Chandlers, mage-in-training, reduced to this sycophant who says "yes sir" and "no sir" or, if Enahar is feeling particularly in need of an ego-boost, "my lord."

Oh yes, Aymery thinks that Enahar is vain, but it's only in his thoughts that Aymery dares to ridicule his savior, his master, the one who will send him to his doom. In reality, he stays tight-lipped, fear and his remaining shreds of good sense prevailing, while Enahar instructs him on how to break into a peaceful temple city and let pirates in so that they can slaughter everyone inside. Or take them captive for who knows what (Aymery doesn't want to know; if he doesn't know, he wasn't part of it). He takes to heart the ease with which Enahar conducts his affairs, such authority echoing in his voice that all comply immediately, because that's how he needs to act.

He'll have to hide behind his unassuming air, so that he can let the pirates in; just like Enahar hides his madness and paranoia while offering young mages salvation, until they're all trapped in his fabulous web of intrigue.

It would put his own family's political dealings to shame, Aymery thinks without smiling, though he clings to this distraction and wants to. He wonders for a moment what his family would think if they saw him now, humbled Chandler pride before the scum, so ready to commit murder.

They would be horrified.

And if he's horrified along with them it fades away in the throb of his earring, reminding him of his bloody destiny.

 

The night Aymery arrives at the temple he's going to destroy, he puts those newfound skills to work. If Winding Circle suspects anything, they hide it just as well as Enahar did on his ship. Aymery's bedded in a Water dormitory among novices and scholars, and not thought of twice even by the people who greet him with absent familiarity. Aymery spends a few nights just fitting in, smiling at the mages who are so calm and polite (they'll be easily brought to heel by the slave-collars that'll be fitted around their necks) until he can't bring himself to any longer.

Whether it's because he pulls off a stunning acting job, or because everyone's still focused on rebuilding, Aymery doesn't know, and he doesn't care, except after a few days a pretty girl smiles at him while he's trying to figure out how to ask permission to use the libraries. They stroll around the temple city, across the famous gardens and winding path that he won't appreciate, except as obstacles and terrain; he smiles at her as though he's not secretly smug they've managed to catch the timing of the guard switch around the Hub. He intrigues her, he notices; she calls him mysterious. That brings a genuine smile to his face, although whether it's laced with irony, even Aymery wouldn't know.

Aymery Chandler, and that's what he's been called for most of his life, is not mysterious. Aymery Glassfire, the new mage-name he uses to accent his persona (like white-wash covering rot) and believes he deserves, would love to be an enigma, but he hasn't been Glassfire for even a year yet. Fortunately, a Chandler replaces mystery with devious instinct at getting what they want, bargaining Blue Traders out of their ships in half a lazy noon hour, so that will probably help him well enough.

He bids farewell to the girl before she wants him to leave - she's charmed by his good looks in a flirtatious and superficial way - because she has no magic (thus soon enough she'll be lying on the ground with her throat slit, or blood seeping out of a wound in her stomach.)

Aymery didn't know he was ruthless until that moment, turning his back on the girl and walking inside, but the realization hits him, and he doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

He's a Chandler through and through, at last, because Chandlers will do whatever it takes to survive.

 

The night Pirate's Point's lighthouse explodes, Aymery is having a guilt crisis at Winding Circle's library, having finally secured permission just that day to research there.

Aymery languishes among books and old parchment, dust wafting up in dry puffs - like the dust gathered among old bones - to tickle his nose. Dust particles dance in the darkness with every inhale an exhale, glittering away in the circle of light cast by his magic.

Aymery is not a strong mage. He's proficient enough, much to his parents' pleasure as they parade him around, like a circus act offering cheap entertainment, but he's not a master - not an Enahar, or a Niklaren Goldeye, or a Dedicate Rosethorn. He's not a particularly good scholar either, but he takes perverse enjoyment in lingering over the texts that Winding Circle will not let just anyone see, if only because it takes his mind off what he's about to do.

Winding Circle's peace disturbs him on the most profound level possible.

Aymery's been finding it harder to eat and sleep. Dark circles have not yet been etched around his eyes - Aymery checks every day with his shaving mirror of the finest Hataran glass - but a few weeks longer and he's probably going to go as mad as a Kurchali Emperor of old. The pirates would dismiss this in disinterest, since enlightenment is rumored to be a particularly virulent disease swarming in Winding Circle's libraries, so Aymery's similar symptoms wouldn't stand out, but Aymery cares. Aymery cares very much whether he's going to stay sane or not to enjoy his life without debt to pirates. Winding Circle isn't making it very easy.

It was laughably easy to agree to this on the pirate ship (maybe far too easy even then), when the plunder was far away, precious only for its mages and texts, and he wasn't really going to get blood on his hands. But then he actually arrived and found it nothing like Lightsbridge. This calm, peaceful temple-city has no equal, for it has not only survived an earthquake, but acts like a beacon, sweeping the rest of Emelan up with its regained tranquility. The only other place as amazing is his room back with his family, before Aymery Chandler became Aymery Glassfire, he who the usurers deny loans, but he refuses to compare the temple with his family, so Winding Circle remains a uniquely peaceful paradise in his mind.

(The first lesson Aymery learned pertaining to the Chandlers was family solidarity.)

Aymery's going to destroy it.

Aymery is not a ruthless person by nature. He's a Chandler through and through, won't give up without fight, won't throw away anything until it's been passed from family to family and no one will keep it any longer, but that's stubbornness. Of COURSE, once the reality of it set in that they're actually going to attack (that girl he walked with lying with her throat slit on her ground - you killed me, you killed me) he would second-guess himself.

'And isn't this a lovely time to do it?' Aymery tells himself with a humorless chuckle at his own expense. 'Be like Enahar,' Aymery tells himself. 'Just do it.'

In some ways, it soothes him that the whole venture is disturbing him. Aymery recognizes on a conscious level what it would mean if a hundred dead DIDN'T disturb him - he'll be quicksilver then too, fluid and unaffected, not like shatter-prone glass at all. He tells himself that it's worth sleepless nights to recognize that he's still human, though he's still going to go through with it, as though that's enough.

The renowned moral literature before him gives him not a clue to his dilemma.

So when Aymery's told of the site of the explosion, his earlobe throbbing with Enahar's pleasure at this success - no light will fall on his ships he plans to attack with - he does what he has always planned to.

That urge to survive drives him forwards again, and he tells himself that, if he weren't doing this, someone else would. He tells himself that they're not his family - because the only people Aymery has been taught to be deeply loyal to are his family. He tells himself that it won't be HIS fault, not really.

When the excuses proves insufficient to let him sleep, he reminds himself of his guilt over this venture - he thinks, desperate man that he is, that guilt will be enough.

 

The night that Aymery Chandler realizes his cousin's at the temple, he had just finished laying a spell to shatter every single mirror and seeing crystal that could warn Winding Circle of their fate.

He was merely the channel for the magics that destroyed, but he couldn't help but think, as cracks etched on smooth surfaces, about how his family would pale at the very thought of such waste. It's for a... for a... Aymery can't assure himself that it's for a good cause, on the way to Discipline Cottage; he decides it was for an important reason, and leaves it at that. His family haunts him, though. Family's been cropping up in his thoughts more and more, silently condemning his actions. Aymery shouts at his thoughts (here is the realization of his suspicion that Winding Circle's peace would drive him mad) that Winding Circle is NOT his family.

Family solidarity is the first lesson he ever learned about the Chandler way of dealing with problems - before how to deny, before how to ignore, before how to make excuses, before manipulation, before compromise, and all other skills born of political jungles. He was so young that he cannot recall the situation, only the solution. A voice had told him to stay close to his brothers and sisters, to the Chandler name; the merchant house closed ranks. Aymery learned young to love his family. He would let a hundred die to save a member of his family.

So he refuses to think about Winding Circle as anything like family, despite that despicable peace, and prays that the whole farce will be over soon.

Discipline Cottage does not make it easy either.

There are three adults and four children there - two women and a man, who Aymery assumes to be the famous Dedicates Rosethorn and Lark, and the Niklaren Goldeye he is looking for to deliver a letter to. The mages and the four children (whom he dismisses as unimportant) are seated around the dining table, and talking about something that looks very serious - probably the pirates.

Despite looking on edge, the scene is domestic, peaceful, and reminiscent of a family, as the impersonal dormitories and dining hall were not.

Aymery's foolish enough to think he can get through this as long as he sticks to his plan, before he learns that the best laid plans have a way of shattering like glass that's been cooled too quickly.

"C-cousin AYMERY?"

It's one of the dismissed children who's stuttering, a small thing despite her plumpness, with her shocked chalk-white face and tightly wound copper curls...

Copper hair...

Her eyes are gray and owl-huge behind her spectacles, which only reinforces the impression of Chandler, but it still takes him a moment to understand why he's thinking of Darra, and a Midwinter gathering two years ago at Ninver.

"Yes, Aymery's my name," he acknowledges, trying to place that face somewhere. He adds to the three expectant adults, "I'm Aymery Glassfire, I should have said before - Glassfire is my mage name. But you, little girl -"

She sways a bit; the red hair swings like copper wire, wild and difficult, Darra's hair, and it just clicks.

"It's Darra and Valden's girl, isn't it?" he asks, thinking of that sulky little creature hiding in the corner with her arms around the dog, red curls vivid against the dog's black coat, and glaring at anyone who dared come close. "The - the one who likes to read? Treze - Troi - Trisana, that's it."

It feels like a stone squats in his stomach; for the life of him, he can't think for a moment, because he knows her answer before she says it, yet dreads knowing all the same.

"Yes." Her cheeks are faint pink, and if Aymery could think, he would be jealous that she can indulge in this display of emotion, which is a luxury he does not have.

There's a sinking feeling somewhere in his gut that Aymery thought had passed after the library. Apparently, he was wrong.

Apparently, his brain thinks his conscious decisions are wrong, because his mouth seems to be digging him deeper despite the part of him that wants to say DON'T ASK; he quashes it quickly, because if he's willing to ignore family, then what will be left of Aymery after this is all over?

"The last time I was in Ninver," he muses, " - how long ago?"

Her voice is so soft it's barely above a whisper. "Two years."

He remembers now. Trisana and her precious books, the ghost in the corner with her animal friends and family aversion, wariness of being seen and lack of attention. He has never known her well, but he remembers how wrong it felt that someone with a Chandler's fiery hair could just fade away unnoticed, for who would want to be a face in the crowd when the masses could know your name? Unkind words formed a sort of bubble keeping Trisana from the rest of the Chandlers.

The Aymery who'd taken family solidarity to heart, who'd walked up to the little girl because, at nineteen, he'd felt smart enough to understand family in a way he thought the children could not, would have been horrified at what he's doing now.

He speaks again to take his mind off guilt. "That's right. And they'd sent you to live with Uncle Murris and Aunt Emmine. No one would tell me why."

Aymery wishes very badly he were at the library again, the last place he felt like this, because at least there, he would be alone as his mind tries to keep from exploding.

Trisana is here.

Trisana is here.

Family is here.

The shock loosens his tongue like so much fine wine, judging by the words he stutters to Goldeye. "I - I don't know what to say. I never thought to find relatives here. I just" - he catches himself in time and scrambles for an alternative answer to 'I just followed orders' before he remembers his official reason - "promised Smokewind I'd give you that letter, since I was coming to Winding Circle."

Aymery is not entirely sure he's managed to fool the greatest vision mage in the world with this half-truth, but his mind won't worry about that when there's another matter altogether to consider.

Besides, the other mages seem to have accepted his appearance - Enahar really is good for something more than binding death spells to earrings in case you betray him and sucking magic from his slaves. The introductions made, and his ensuing conversation, fade into the back of his mind as Aymery obsesses over the one matter most important. His eyes are following his younger cousin, wondering at the quiet conversation between the children as they clean up supper.

Maybe if he'd had the feeling of despair at the beginning of the bargain that he has now, he wouldn't have agreed to ransack Winding Circle to pay off his debts. Better yet, if he had been more careful with his money (some sort of Chandler he is) he wouldn't have overspent and been here in the first place.

He can't tell himself that she's not his family, because she is that shy girl who smiled when she understood that Cousin Aymery was not being unkind (at least until Aymery saw that smile; the smile disappeared instantly then.) Insisting that someone else could be doing this doesn't help either, because someone else would find Trisana insignificant, and Aymery couldn't if he tried. He can cling only to the knowledge that it's not his fault, not really, but he finds that it isn't good enough. Not anymore.

Aymery doesn't know how the Great Mages noticed his attention off somewhere else, but he's certain that they've caught him when Dedicate Rosethorn sends Trisana into another room. She glances sideways at him, a realm of thought behind green-glazed hazel eyes, then back at the door. Lark's smile accompanies Rosethorn's glance like they're two halves of a whole.

Master Goldeye is not subtle. Master Goldeye is staring right through him, like a master passing down judgment, the sea drowning disrespectful sailors. Aymery hates the wealth of knowledge in the mage's dark eyes, knowledge he doesn't possess, so he quickly takes the hint and rises from the table to follow Trisana. Goldeye's eyes bore into the back of the skull, but with what? Warning? Aymery isn't sure.

Her back is to the door. She's on the other side of the room, at the counter, doing something that she blocks with her body; he has the impression of someone very small. He takes a moment to think while he approaches her soundlessly, not as well as a thief, but nearly, wondering what he's going to do.

She's a child. She's his family. She's going to be killed. 

Hundreds will die so he can live, but he will not kill his cousin.

The answer is so simple - to get her away - but he's not sure how he's going to do it. The pirates won't mind, he tells himself; she has no magic. She is a child; she is no threat to them.

The answer, he realizes eventually, is, of course, family. Trisana is a Chandler too.

Family solidarity.

When he's close to her elbow, Aymery can see the small bird that Trisana is feeding. She is so fragile and delicate, so gentle with the bird despite the sharp exterior.

"You do that very well," he murmurs, only realizing she hadn't noticed his presence when she jumps, flecking milk on her cheek. She looks very much like a bird then, wide-eyed and sharp-boned, poised for flight if he so much makes a move.

"I've been practicing all day," she explains softly as she dabs the milk off her cheek. Competent hands cover the bird's nest where her pet starling's blinking sleepily, appearing as fragile as Trisana looks to him, even though she's much rounder than the starling.

Here's his chance to ask the questions.

"Why aren't you in Ninver? All Master Goldeye would say is that you're his student. I'm envious, you know. Niklaren Goldeye is on the Mage-Council of Lightsbridge. He's very famous -"

"Will you stop talking long enough for a person to answer your questions?" she demands, frustrated.

He quiets down, taking a breath - he tells himself to be a channel for Enahar's confidence. "Sorry. I guess I'm excited, meeting him, and - and finding you, of course." Excited is not the right word. "Why are you here?"

She's frowning at him, at his face, and Aymery does his best to remain bland - it's difficult when she answers.

"They didn't want me," she says flatly, like it's not a fact that completely shakes him. "They gave me to Broken Circle Temple, and Broken Circle sent me here. I didn't know till I'd been here for weeks that Broken Circle sent me because I had magic."

She has magic.

Aymery isn't sure whether to be relieved at this revelation or not; he's only certain he REALLY doesn't want to know what happens to other slaves now.

Strangely, it's a small detail compared to her first statement - the family didn't want her. He is forced to stop, recall her words, and think, before they sink in properly.

He can't deal with something that big. Not now. Not on the verge of the pirate attack. He sketches the symbol for tranquility - or stillness, or pause, depending on the situation - on the counter.

"Do you mean the magic-seer didn't find it?" he asks instead. "He saw it in ME."

She's small, but she's like a tight bundle - so like Darra, although Darra had corked her temper long ago - and he can feel the scorching, explosive heat in her reply. "Not me. The family, and Broken Circle" - papers and herbs start to rustle, although there's no wind - "they thought I was possessed, or haunted, or - not all human. They -"

It takes nothing less than herbs rising and rustling with wind to stop her. Aymery watches her, her face flushed and Something flowing in her, something terrible, like a dark hole where the unknown lurks. He thinks he could understand, if that Something broke out among the Chandlers, why there was such a bubble around her at the party. Her hair shines with something more than light, barely moving despite the wind, and tension crackles with every breath and in her eyes. The Chandlers are conservative. Nevertheless, family is family, and he doesn't believe the family is as terrible as she says. He CAN'T.

A sigh drifts out of her just as the wind stops, settling into peace that he doesn't really feel; that Something ebbs away. She's a small girl again, like flaccid water-bag when it is empty. "Niko says my magic's - strange. It's tied into weather. I don't understand it myself."

"They TOLD us a mage never stops learning things," Aymery recalls, catching on immediately.

Weather witch. The family would love one.

Trisana will be going home, and Aymery will be free.

"Ah - Trisana -”

"Tris," she interrupts. "Only Cousin Uraelle called me by my full name."

"Tris," he says, and doesn't regret lying to manipulate her to go home. "I had a letter from Mother - it was waiting for me when I got here. She says Uncle Valden is ill, maybe dying. I think you should go home, as soon as possible."

He expects fear to flitter across Trisana's face at her family being in danger. Astonishment. Anger. Something.

He is disappointed.

There is just a moment of surprise - and then it's gone. Trisana has no expression on her face when she shocks him.

She says, "If my father wants me, he'll send for me," although it's more of a snap.

She says, "The last time I saw him, he told a stranger that he and my mother didn't want me back."

She says, "Not ever!"

There's another sinking feeling in his gut, but whether she's overreacting or not, Aymery won't budge. Either way, this is for her own good. "You can't let that stand in your way. Go home while you can - that's what I'd do." Oh he would if he could, and he would tell her if he could. "Go home, now, and make your peace with him. I'll give you money for your passage. And there's a ship in Summersea -"

But she won't listen, with that Chandler stubbornness all over again, and he doesn't have a chance to insist, in between the sudden wind - it must be her - and the news of the shattered mirrors. There's the proof that she's a Chandler, even if she's lost her way away from the family.

Aymery will keep her alive, one way or another.

He asks her to think about it when he leaves, without much hope, but that hope is all he has.

 

The night Aymery is killed, he pauses on by the staircase leading to the attic room, where Trisana sleeps, though he's so quiet that she couldn't possibly have heard him.

He stands there and savors the stillness. This will be his last restful period for a long time. He hopes she understands.

He's out of the house quickly though he nearly stumbles over the furniture; fortunately, no one stirs. No one notices.

It's the finale now. Half an hour and there will be no room to turn back, no way to stop, jump now off the cliff and there will be no way back up. But aren't all actions like that? Time waits for no one. He keeps going; the voices that represent Winding Circle have stopped needling him for days already, ever since he met Trisana again, like his promise to save her and his guilt were enough to wash it away.

Aymery can see his family's faces staring at him in horror now, disowning him for consorting with pirates, what a disgrace of a promising mage, but he ignores them. He'll keep Trisana alive. It will have to be enough. It's certainly more than the family's done, he reminds himself as he nears the gate to let the pirates in. What right do their voices have to lecture him about right and wrong, when the very first lesson he was taught was a lie all along? How can he be more wrong than them, no matter what he does? This will be his compromise (compromised morals) between doing something terrible and dying.

He'll be free then, and the desperate man he is, he really thinks he will be rid of pirates, morals, and regret, just by this one act of good.

He tries to explain this to his silly cousin when she interrupts his venture, but she doesn't listen, and she's too late anyway.

When Aymery Glassfire dies, betrayed by his pirate allies, it is with his justification on his mind.

Whatever that is, no one knows.

 

The night Tris visits the memorial for the hundreds of people she killed, she does it with three others in her mind who can understand her every mood.

She is cast in flickering shadow as she watches fires rise up into the sky, a girl, a ghost, a small creature edged in red and far too quiet for her wide thoughts. Her red hair sway from the winds of her emotion, her Chandler red hair, and her gray eyes glow, her Chandler gray eyes, as she contemplates the man her cousin was, in Ninver, and then here, in the very end. What was he thinking in those last days, when he was going to kill?

She remembers, for a moment, that conversation they shared upon first meeting. She knows now why he wanted her away, some small act of good among the horror. It's not enough. Her fist clenches as she thinks of what the future could have brought for her new family, because of him.

That doesn't mean she doesn't grieve. He was a traitor to this entire country, but he was family, and Tris won't let that justify his death as right.

(One day this concept will extend to her beyond family, in a city far in the south.)

And who is she to judge? Hundreds of sparks rise up in the red fire - winking out all of a sudden as the winds rise with her emotion. Yet another set of lights she has destroyed.

Sandry reminds her that it's not her fault, but Tris knows it is.

Daja reminds her that others would have killed, but Tris knows no one else could.

Briar reminds her that she's helping their prisoners now, but Tris knows it isn't ENOUGH.

Only thoughts like those separate her from her cousin, so she'll keep them as long as she lives.

 

They would not be judged differently under a magistrate.


End file.
